March 11, 2018

I believe it was almost exactly nine years ago that Rush Limbaugh caught grief for saying that he hoped Barack Obama failed in his goals.

He was broadly denounced as anti-American by progressives (which is always funny since they despise their country most of the time), but Limbaugh was on solid ground.

Obama's stated goals would cripple the country. His actual policies did cripple it.

A few months ago I pointed out that Obama managed to drive the economy into an eight-year recession. The growth he claimed was paid for by doubling the national debt. The stock market rose only because the Federal Reserve was juicing it up.

(Speaking of which, maybe those corrections were the Fed unwinding its stake? Food for thought.)

The Quisling Never Trumpers claim to be in the same position as Limbaugh in opposing Donald Trump's policies. They argue that their stand is a principled one, based on what's good for America.

The problem with this argument is that their own words directly contradict it.

Jen Rubin, for example, has reversed herself on every single policy she held simply to oppose Trump. Bret Stephens has done the same.

It is one thing to rethink a long-held belief. This often requires years of thoughtful reflection as well as considerable debate. The Never Trump traitors haven't done that. They simply flip-flopped as soon as Trump acted.

In the process, they have also revealed that they don't really care about America's success. Their own emotional state and social status is what it truly important to them.

For example, they warn that raising tariffs will cause a trade war and a global recession. This is nonsense on stilts. "Free trade" has crippled the middle class, destroyed the working class and made us increasingly dependent on global rivals for strategic materials.

Throughout history nations have protected key industries from foreign competition without causing commercial havoc. It was only in the last three decades that "free trade" became an article of faith for the neocons and their progressive allies.

Similarly, restricting immigration used to be a core conservative principle. Open borders is a radical departure from American policy and without precedent in human history. No nation, no state or realm ever threw open its doors to anyone who wanted to come in - and then blessed them with full citizenship. It's a recipe for national suicide.

Yet now the Benedict Arnold Right loves it and denounces actual border enforcement as racist.

The theme running through all their policies is fear and hatred. Fear of losing status and hatred of the working classes that elected a blowhard from Queens to the White House.

Yet that blowhard is more competent than any of his Ivy League predecessors. The economy is booming with more gains on the way. American military might is being slowly restored. Our enemies are alarmed and our people are more optimistic than they have been in 20 years.

This gets us to the real reason why the Never Trumpers are so angry: America might actually become stronger.

And it will have happened without them.

Consider last week's opening with North Korea. If this pans out, it would be a game-changer, a milestone is improving global security. The US has made a single concession: long-overdue face-to-face talks with North Korea.

In return the Norks have pledged to cease nuclear tests and missile launches and claims they will allow military exercises with South Korea to proceed without incident.

The US holds all the cards in this deal. If the Norks violate their pledges, they lose and the US military will resume its Doomsday Countdown on Little Rocket Man. But if they do hold true, it will be the first time they ever kept their word. That's pretty significant.

And yet the Never Trumpers are up in arms, supposedly because (it's hard not to laugh as I type this) it's an affront to democracy for a US president to sit down with a tin-pot dictator.

Yeah, I know. Where do they get this stuff?

The real fear, though, is that Trump might actually solve the problem, just as they fear his tariff will work and his border enforcement will work.

That is their ultimate nightmare, their greatest fear: that Orange Julius, whom they claim is ignorant, has a ten-second attention span, a witless baboon descending an escalator, that this guy will have exposed them as clueless idiots whose policies produced nothing but disaster.

It's one thing to be proven wrong, but it's another to be proven wrong by...Donald Trump!

That is why they are screaming their damn fool heads off over everything he does.

March 05, 2018

I'm old enough to remember when the Democrats actually pretended to care about blue collar jobs. Maybe it was a ruse back then, but they faked it well.

These days the Dems hold the working man in absolute contempt. Steelworkers, coal miners, skilled trades, heavy construction - all of these are icky jobs that need to go away. The progressive American Dream is a society consisting of tech firms, trendy non-profits who get their lawns mowed by indentured servants imported from exotic locales.

But these new feudal overlords will still drink "fair trade" lattes, so it's all good!

Back in the real world, "free trade" has been a disaster for the working classes and that damage has now spread both up and down. Trump's proposed tariffs are about protecting vital strategic industries and limiting further damage both to our economy and our social fabric.

The bizarre argument that domestic steel will make cars more expensive can only be made by ignoring the effects of not using domestic steel - higher unemployment, more drug use, more societal breakdown.

After all, who is supposed to buy these cars when all the workers are outsourced?

More tellingly, how is the United States supposed to defend its interests when it has to buy the steel for its weapons from its global challengers?

The argument for free trade was originally made in a world where the standard of living even in prosperous nations was abject poverty. The idea was that the dirt-stained wretches working in the fields should plant what grew best and trade for variety with other nations. There is a lot of merit to this.

But even back then it was understood that free laborers could not compete with slaves. Yet that is exactly where we are today, with first-world workers being asked to yield their jobs to convict labor in China and other shithole (to coin a phrase) countries.

It is hard for me to understand how the hard-fought gains of labor - which includes safety, working conditions, workman's comp as well as wages - can be completely abandoned in the space of a generation by the political party that once claimed to champion them.

Does anyone feel that there is a net gain to sending ships to India or Bangladesh to be broken up by destitute workers with no safety gear while American yards remain idle?

(This by the way exposes the lie at the heart of western environmentalism: they don't care about the earth as a whole, they just want their neighborhood to be nice and tidy. They are quite happy to outsource pollution so long as they keep their own hands clean.)

Donald Trump won election in large part by giving voice to those who had been left behind by the political establishment. When Barack Obama derided Trump's determination to revive domestic manufacturing as "waving a magic wand," he not only exposed his own ignorance but also demonstrated his contempt for the working classes.

There is nothing inevitable about globalization. It is a policy favored by transnational mega-corporations to maximize profit at the expense of the workers and the societies they support.

Global trade has existed for centuries, but it was only recently that elites decided to sell out their native populations to make a quick buck.

I've noted this before but it bears repeating: Trump is proving himself to be a true conservative on this issue, hearkening back to the original platform of the Republican Party. The Quisling NeverTrump lunatics screaming that free trade is a core conservative principle are - as usual - lying through their caviar-stained teeth.

Like all things Trump, the real question is what he does rather than what he says. As with DACA and gun control (and a host of other things) Trump's statements are often just trial balloons, an opening offer designed to draw out potential opponents. The key with Trump is to see what he does rather than what he says.

In the interim, however, Trump has once again forced his opponents to expose themselves as implacably hostile to blue-collar workers, who will no doubt take note and act accordingly.

March 02, 2018

Our snarky dimwit resident troll tried to be clever when my co-blogger highlighted the paradox of Big Government: the larger it gets, the less effective it is. That is likely because there is no logical refutation of his point and an abundance of evidence confirming its truth.

We already knew that Florida law enforcement let this problem fester for years and bent over backwards to avoid taking any action that would actually stop the shooter from taking action.

Today's grim revelation brings us the news that the Broward County deputies who did nothing but hide behind their cars while school children were being gunned down were likely just following orders.

If true, this would be damning indictment of their leadership since it has long been known that the best tactic to stop shooters of this kind is to engage them as quickly as possible to disrupt their plans.

Creating a perimeter does nothing but help the killer increase his body count.

Of course, the department will naturally close ranks to protect its own. The State can do whatever it damn well wants and if you don't like it shut up.

The past couple of years have been a masterclass in how law enforcement will stand idly by and watch people get beaten and even killed without lifting a finger to stop it. This is only the most egregious example.

Thanks to the judicially-invented construct of sovereign immunity, citizens have no recourse. The officers responsible cannot be lawfully punished for their refusal to act.

Isn't that convenient?

But yes, let us pretend that if only people were more helpless and vulnerable society would be safer. Let us ignore the racist roots of gun control and how its burden never touches the wealthy but only falls on the common people.

What we really need is a world where life or death depends on what unaccountable police officers are feeling at the moment of truth.

By the way, these same officers are often accused of unjustly targeting minorities. What a great idea to give them more power and less accountability!

I would be more sympathetic to calls for gun control if those who failed in their responsibility to protect the innocents were punished - not just with paid time off or an early retirement, but with actual jail time.

February 19, 2018

I see that National Review's Kevin Williamson has taken a break from wishing the white working class would just die off to offer his advice on dealing with the FBI's failure to stop the Florida shooter: Fire the director.

It's the usual terrible advice wrapped in fake tough-guy bluster.

Williamson specializes in this bullshit posing. Remember, this someone who considered himself a hero for snatching a woman's cell phone and smashing it during a stage performance.

Yeah, he's a regular Audie Murphy.

All the Quisling Never Trumpers are like that, thumping their chests about their brave stand against straw men while they come up with the "conservative case" for doing whatever liberals want them to do.

In point of fact, firing the current director will no nothing to dig out the rot within the organization. Not only will it be ineffective, it will make things worse, since the new leadership would have to start from scratch while the guilty parties would have that much more time to burrow in and cover their asses.

The FBI has been corrupted over many years, starting with its handover of background files to the Clinton White House. It may be arguably easier to simply disband the organization and start over.

No, the easy thing to demand Trump do something stupid and preen while doing it.

Which is pretty much par for the course for the Quisling Never Trumpers.

Before getting into quotes, I will first provide some original content.

My generation is probably the youngest one that can still remember what used to be called "decency." There were things that people simply didn't say.

My grandparents didn't smoke, drink or swear - limitations that seem quaint today but were still common in my youth. A political candidate who had an extra-marital affair was immediately disqualified from holding office, which is why those that did took great pains to keep it secret.

No one wrote these rules out, it was just understood that certain things were off limits.

In my youth, those limits were under assault by smarty-pants liberals who liked to poke fun at them. There's nothing inherently wrong with that of course - people have made fun on societal conventions since they had societal conventions, but the difference was that this was all mean-spirited humor. Liberals viewed the conventions as stupid and wrong, and wanted sweep them away.

As this process unfolded, the defenders of the old values tried to resist, but they were hampered by their adherence to those values. To refer back to a personal example, my grandparents believed it was deeply wrong to insult people. Because of this, they put themselves at a disadvantage against those for whom insult and ridicule were the the go-to weapons.

This was a major factor in the degeneration of their church, the United Methodists. Despite the howlings of the progressives, the old-timers didn't hate gay people, and they recoiled from repeated insult and abuse. Their opponents exploited this advantage and so the Methodists effectively purged the people who were once the pillars of their faith.

The same dynamic was in play in the broader society. Gangsta rap, increasingly pornographic-style sex scenes in movies, ultra-violence being glorified for its own sake, and the common theme that conventional values were worthless hypocrisy made a remorseless advance across the cultural landscape.

In 1988, Gary Hart's political career was destroyed by the revelation of an affair. By 1992, Bill Clinton was able to survive the scandal by saying it was in the past. By 1998, he was able to survive an affair consummated in the Oval Office by arguing that personal character no longer mattered.

This progression was essentially how we got President Trump.

After decades of losing and watching their values get trashed, the cultural conservatives came to understand that adhering to the rules of decency was a sucker's game. We learned that our grandparents tactics were self-defeating.

To be clear, most conservative people never changed their views on appropriate tactics. The change came because the old generation passed away and the new generation grew up with the rules as they saw them.

A Christian conservative born in 1925 would never in a million years have voted for Trump, but one born in 1980 can do so with glee.

As Klavan puts it:

The left wants us to reel in shock that Donald Trump chased women or praised Russian strong men? Who was it who defended the infidelities and possible rapes of Bill Clinton? Who was it who turned a blind eye to Barack Obama consorting with terrorists and hate-mongers like Farrakhan?

That last passage reminds me of the time the Obama White House hosted a rapper whose album featured a dead judge. The future Quisling Never Trumpers clicked their tongues, but the rest of us took note that this was now the new normal. Obama had just formally endorsed making fun of dead judges.

I mention this specific example because one can't help but notice how much of the progressive agenda and The Resistance is being advanced by judicial overreach. Should (God forbid) an activist judge get the same treatment meted out to the GOP Congress at baseball practice, I'm sure that album photo will get prominent placement in right-wing media and that the left will completely ignore it.

I was interested to see that my co-blogger's post got linked by Fark and - as one would expect - the two comments they left consisted of a personal insult and a pathetic straw man. Such is the intellectual rigor of our opponents. (Our resident troll - as usual - offered a link rather than coming up with an original argument on his own.)

Turning back to Klavan's quote, the long-suppressed photo of Barack Obama grinning with Louis Farrakhan carries particular import in our tempestuous times. Within hours of the school shooting (which the FBI could have stopped, but didn't), the mainstream press was speculating that a white nationalist did the dirty need. Law enforcement subsequently said there's no evidence of this, but progressives got their smear out there, so mission accomplished.

The problem for them is that the cry of "racism" has lost its power and again, this is not because conservatives became suddenly bigoted but because the left has been showing their own bigotry non-stop for the last decade.

The younger generation has come of age steeped in anti-white rhetoric and at the same time knows that black nationalism is treated as a positive good. Another cultural more has been destroyed.

Great job, progressives.

I miss the old culture - the campy conventions where people used euphemisms and clever insults rather than dropping f-bombs all over the place. The movies were better, the music was better and society was better.

Back then, people of goodwill across the political spectrum were working towards racial reconciliation. Don't tell me the 80s were a nightmare of segregation and bigotry when the three most popular people were Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.

Despite a more diverse population, race relations are now the worst I've ever seen, and that's because the left made it okay to hate. They thought that exception only applied to them, but the common culture cuts both ways.

Schlichter is right - liberals are going to hate the world they created.

February 17, 2018

One way of examining an event is to explore a counterfactual case - that is to say, looking at what didn't happen.

In an alternate reality, there would be a minor local news item about a mentally ill Florida man who made terrorist threats on the internet, was reported to the FBI who in turn notified local law enforcement. The guy was a known troublemaker and with this additional input, they finally obtained a warrant from a judge to have him taken into custody.

If that had happened, the pain in our fallen world would be a little less.

But it didn't happen, and the reason it didn't happen is that the FBI didn't take any action. Local law enforcement's attitude seemed to be an exasperated shrug and the politicians have zero interest in mental health law reform because it is a complex issue and it is hard for them to strike morally preening poses while vilifying their enemies.

Plus, it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

We have the most incompetent political class in my lifetime and the repeated failure of lawmakers to do anything about the problem of "known wolves" is a key indicator of that incompetence.

Another is the failure of law enforcement itself. The FBI has revealed itself to be a completely corrupt organization. Its culture is one where solving crime takes a back seat to political intrigue. The RUSSIA fiasco is only the latest and most revealing example of their decadence and ineptitude, but there are countless examples of them dropping the ball, from the Boston Marathon bombing to serving as Whitey Bulger's muscle.

There is also the Fast and Furious scandal, which produced zero criminal action despite thousands of weapons being illegally sold to known criminals. I wish to underline this particular point: not only were no criminals rounded up as a result of the sales, no officials were held responsible when people were killed with the illegally sold weapons. It is a culture of total impunity.

Similarly, the FBI was well aware of the terrorist attack on Pam Gellar's Mohammed cartoon show and arguably had a part in provoking it, but once again they did nothing to stop it, not even warning local law enforcement to be vigilant.

They clearly don't care if people get killed.

The lesson from all of this is that passing more laws will do nothing because not only won't they be enforced, no one will be punished for not enforcing them. We will have a situation where everything is technically illegal but only the politically vulnerable are targeted. This is why Black Lives Matter above all things should be vehemently against gun control.

If you believe there is a racist culture in law enforcement, why would you want the police to have even more power? Does anyone seriously think that the first wave of house-to-house searches for guns will take place in Upper East Side Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Springs? I think you'll see them in Chicago, Detroit and other minority-majority areas - the same places where carnage is commonplace and the media is completely silent about it.

Giving the state even more power when it can't manage to effectively use the power it has is madness. I suppose it's emotionally satisfying to say "DO SOMETHING!!!" but the thing that needs to be done is logically review where the gaps in our mental health laws are as well as demanding full accountability from law enforcement as to why they routinely refuse to act on information about a fully preventable crime.

That's hard, which is why progressives would rather preen and call people they don't like names.

The former first lady is unrecognizable as herself, and the main object of the painting seems to be her billowing and complex dress. I actually took an art history course in college, and the blue background is part of the "half-assed" movement that emerged during the latter half of the 20th Century.

The ex-president's portrait is even odder, with the president seemingly vanishing (or emerging from) a layer of ivy. There is no perspective on the background - his feet and the legs of the chair just end in mid-air, perhaps symbolizing the ethereal nature of his presidency.

Adding further nuance is the fact that the chair and president are lit from the front, but there are no shadows on the greenery behind him. This also is a trait of the "half-assed" school, since (as the savants at 4chan have documented), the background appears to be the result of a copy-and-paste job.

If one takes the time to go through previous presidential portraits, there are two clear trends. The first is the impact of photography, which displaced traditional portraiture as a medium of record. Once it was clear that an absolute likeness could be produced by technological means, traditional painting seemed anachronistic.

This led to the second trend, and that is Democrats opting to go for oddball approaches for their official portraits. FDR's is the first example, with his hands seeming more important than the man himself. Truman bucked the trend, but then JFK went all-in on the new goofiness. LBJ and Jimmy Carter went the conventional route, but Bill Clinton followed his idol's footsteps and when with a caricature rather than an actual likeness.

And now we have the Obamas.

The left didn't used to be so monolithic in terms of political correctness. Oh, they were political, but a substantial portion of the arts establishment could set aside politics where aesthetics were concerned.

Those days are long over. For progressives, to know a Republican is to shun him. The quality of their art is secondary to their political identification.

The drive for purity also has tainted the art itself, so that the full spectrum of the human experience is no longer something to be explored. Now all works must be tested for political correctness and only those found sufficiently virtuous can be allowed to flourish.

Legions of would-be censors scour the internet for thought crimes and instantly pounce on "problematic" items.

What you get is what we see here: boring garbage. I wager that your average sidewalk painter at an art fair should could produce superior work.

In a related vein, it appears the new comic book movie ("Black Panther" I believe) is now the most perfect film ever released. Anyone who disparages it faces public abuse and threats of harm.

I don't watch comic book movies any more, but I suspect that this one is just as awful as the rest, but for some reason it is now an Important Symbol of the Movement.

Partly this is because this film is the first move ever to feature a black superhero. Apparently Blade, Men in Black and Hancock (to name but a few) don't count.

I'm really getting tired of this current generation pretending that they are pioneers blazing trails in equality when in fact they're driving down an interstate built by their grandparents' blood and sweat.

The worst part of this is that it drives actual pioneers down the memory hole. Hatty McDaniels is all but forgotten, partly because her outstanding performance is in a movie that is now deemed "problematic."

February 02, 2018

So the Nunes memo finally dropped. Finally we can talk about something that has happened.

I've seen a fair amount of commentary, but one thing I have not seen is an appreciation for the memo on its own terms.

The indisputable facts are this: Carter Page was targeted by the FBI for extensive electronic surveillance. Page was chosen because the FBI claimed that he represented a potential threat to American national security and therefore was entirely deprived of his right to private communications without knowing it.

This intensive violation of his rights was renewed three times, most recently at the end of July, meaning that this loss of privacy lasted for an entire year.

My question is: Who else are they secretly monitoring, and why?

Page was a minor player, a pilot fish in a sea of sharks. He was a political gadly. His window of influence with the Trump campaign was fleeting at best. Once the election was decided, Page was a non-factor. On what grounds could the FBI have possibly had to keep monitoring him?

The Democrats are now citing "national security," but if that's the case, why isn't the former head of counter espionage under investigation? Peter Strzok not only conducted an extramarital affair, he freely circulated his thoughts on an unsecure text massaging system.

If national security means anything, Strzok should have his clearance pulled and be facing termination and possibly jail time.

Again, set aside the RUSSIA narrative and focus on what this tells us about our national security apparatus. A high-level employee who commits multiple infractions of security was only removed from a critical position because it became politically embarrassingfor him to stay where he was.

Now let us say the RUSSIANS also managed to gain access to those texts through the wireless network. Could they not have influenced Strzok? How would we know if he did? The head of FBI counterespionage is a pretty highly placed target for blackmail.

Far more highly placed than Carter Page, for example.

Of course, we cannot ignore the politics of this. If Page was traced, so was everyone he interacted with, which would mean everyone he ever spoke with since 2016 and then everyone they spoke with.

That is to say, the entire Trump campaign.

The memo is not conclusive proof of anything other than corruption within the FBI, particularly its tangled relationship with opposition research organization Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS of course works closely with Vladimir Putin's emissaries. Strange that high government officials sleeping with Fusion GPS employees isn't a problem when Carter Page is.

The scary thing for the Dems is that the memo does not exist by itself. In order to disprove GOP allegations that the FISA court was fed fraudulent applications, those applications themselves must be unsealed.

The Dems will I'm sure once again howl about national security, but the FBI is not above the law. It is not an extra-Constitutional organization whose operatives are free of sin. It is in fact a creature of the Executive Branch, answerable to the president and forced to submit to Congressional oversight.

The Dem notion that the FBI has some sort of super-power to defy both with impunity is something out of Seven Days in May.

If there was any doubt that progressive concern about privacy rights end when they get to be the Lidless Eye, their reaction to the memo utterly destroys it.

February 01, 2018

I didn't post about the State of the Union speech for the simple reason that I didn't watch it.

Our republic is staggering under intense corruption, but at least we still enjoy the freedom to ignore political theater when it suits us. This sets us apart from places like Cuba, North Korea and Iran, where a speech by the Dear Maximum Leader is mandatory viewing.

I did subsequently check out the highlight reel and it was superb, as far as those things go. The important thing about it, however, was not what he said, but how the Democrats reacted to it.

Let there be no mistake: Donald Trump's position on immigration should be a matter of zero controversy. His statements are actually more generous than Bill Clinton's platform in the 1990s. Indeed, portions of his speeches on the subject appear to be deliberately plagiarized so as to evoke the comparison.

Similarly, rendering honor to our flag, respecting military veterans and displaying sympathy to the victims of violent crime were once universal beliefs shared by the political spectrum. Only the most fringe of fringe radicals would advocate hostility to these things.

That is where the Democrats are today.

As is the trend, there is a ton of news about things that haven't happened yet and may not ever happen, but one new twist is the Democrats' newfound belief that guys with guns and badges can do no evil.

So much for Black Lives Matter, eh?

Oh wait, I guess I should qualify that - as long as the guys with guns and badges are federal officialsthey can do no wrong, need no oversight and should never be questioned.

I am referring of course to the bizarre new Democrat fixation with keeping the FBI completely protected from outside scrutiny. Illegal wiretaps, rigged investigations and hidden agendas were once a staple of Hollywood film making. Liberals once earnestly lectured us on how important it was that we keep the FBI under a tight leash and prevent them from subverting Congressional oversight.

We were particularly to be worried about excessive claims of secrecy and national security - which were typically used to hide wrongdoing.

Let us never forget how the FBI tried to bully Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide and subjected him to constant illicit monitoring.

How times have changed! Now asking the FBI to submit to outside authority is - according to the Dems - a scandal in and of itself. Why those conscientious, hard-working agents are incapable of evil and anyone who says otherwise is striking the very foundation of our republic!

These people are utterly shameless.

This is why I can never be a Democrat. I simply can't twist myself into that level of hypocrisy multiple times a week. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when tax cuts for fat cat rich people were terrible, but now Dem jurisdictions are busily trying to find ways to help multi-millionaires avoid higher federal taxes.

All in the name of "fairness," of course.

Tomorrow we might finally see some of the things that people talk about happening happen, and when that happens, I'll comment on it.

January 28, 2018

For a long time, it seems as though we've gone from one awful event to another. The culture has been remorselessly coarsened and our politics is utterly dysfunctional.

But outside the narrow confines of the increasingly out-of-touch media bubble, there are a number of encouraging signs for our society.

The fact is that left's endless war on everything is finally wearing people out. It's like the old joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That's not funny!

That joke is older than I am and it's still funny because it's still true. Happily, a lot of people are checking out of the culture wars and getting on with their lives.

The other day I heard a song on the radio - some alternative station, I forget which - but it was a happy little tune sung by a honey-voiced woman with sparse accompaniment. It's central theme was the once universal dream of young women to settle down with a good man and live happily ever after.

The imagery stuck with me because unlike contemporary popular music, it was so normal.

There was no call for hedonistic sex, the female vocalist didn't proclaim herself an emotional wreck or party animal out on the prowl. Thinking it over, the basic sentiment was really just a throwback to the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice?"

Actually, the sentiment goes back much farther because it is a universal one - an idea rooting in culture, tradition and evolution.

As I listened to the song, I was reminded of the fact that my college-town parish has put out yet another urgent call for volunteers to help manage the growing flood of converts. This has been going on for a while, but apparently the tide is still rising.

Far from the sexual harassment hot spots located in legacy media newsrooms, young people are deciding that maybe grandma and grandpa were on to something. Finding a mate, raising children and having a meaningful life are hard enough without the added difficulty of trying to create an entirely new culture on the fly with nothing else to guide you than resentment at the world.

The angry left is angry because it is so miserable, and its only satisfaction is spreading that misery to others. As the MeToo movement is showing, they are now to the point where they don't care who they destroy, so long as they destroy someone.

It is hard to imaging going through life perpetually enraged about something, waking up each day wondering whose life needs to be ruined for an innocuous remark, a clumsy attempt at a come-on, or something they did that was socially acceptable 20 years ago but now must be called out as an unforgivable sin.

A much more attractive option is to hang out with people who are comfortable with who they are and live by time-tested truths. No wonder people are lining up to get in.